


Abrade

by Beth Harker (Beth_Harker)



Series: You'll have abs in no time. [8]
Category: Be More Chill - Iconis/Tracz
Genre: Character Study, M/M, Michael Focused, Swearing, pet death (remembered)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-26
Updated: 2020-04-04
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:14:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22901530
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beth_Harker/pseuds/Beth%20Harker
Summary: Jeremy’s adventures with the Squip have worn Michael down in a big way, which isn’t good, because he’s suddenly got a lot to deal with.
Relationships: Jeremy Heere/Michael Mell
Series: You'll have abs in no time. [8]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1309493
Comments: 17
Kudos: 53





	1. Chapter 1

Michael gets carried away with stuff. It’s like his main characteristic, aside from the miasma of _profound_ nerdery that trails after him like one of those green squiggles they always draw behind cartoon skunks. On his good days, Michael wears his obsessions like a comfortable hoodie. On bad days? Well, Michael gets by. He’s got seventeen whole years of getting by under his belt, and he’s not about to stop now. 

Michael is _a lot._. There’s just **so much everything** with Michael. It’s like he’s a wave or something— all chill, and swooshy, and shiny, and melodic— but also mega _not_ , because he over does the hell out of all of it. Thing is, nobody wants a tsunami. Tsunamis are bitches. They rush in, filled with all the enthusiasm the ocean has to offer, and rip apart everything in their path. Splash splash mofos.

It’s all good. 

Sorta. 

Kinda. 

It has to be, right?

Michael’s not like Jeremy. He mostly likes himself and doesn’t want to do away with the things that set him apart from the crowd. It’s just that since the Squip, Michael’s been dragged into that crowd whether he likes it or not, and it’s scary, and it’s making him evaluate shit he’s never bothered to evaluate before. It’s like he should reign himself in, but the only way to do so for more than ten minutes is to blank everybody out, and that’s not what he wants. For the first time is his life, Michael craves being liked. He wants to be manageable. 

—————

Jenna is the one who puts the idea of “manageable” into Michael’s head. After days of unceasing peer pressure from Jeremy, Michael agrees to spend a Saturday afternoon hanging with Jenna Rolan. “She’s lonely,” is how Jeremy keeps putting it. “She needs a friend like you. You’re the best friend in the world.” Then he peaces out to be a love dork with Christine. 

Jeremy’s Squip would probably consider _lonely_ to be a euphemism for having no standards. Michael’s never met Jeremy’s Squip, but it’s like he sees it in Jeremy’s eyes sometimes, and it’s not hard to imagine what it thinks of him. In his lower moments, Michael wonders how hard the Squip had to work to get Jeremy to block him out. He knows that Jeremy agreed to it, but Jeremy’s back is also mottled with scars from the electrical shocks the Squip gave him, and he’s got a mega case of PTSD, so maybe the Squip tortured Jeremy until he was in so much pain he couldn’t breathe, and that’s how he agreed to ditch Michael. It would make sense, but something tells Michael it’s not how things went down. Somehow Michael can’t shake the feeling that whatever went wrong, he was part of the problem in ways he can’t even begin to fathom. 

Hanging with Jenna doesn’t go well at all. Michael invites her over and stops at Seven Eleven on the way home, where she blasphemies everything he and Seven Eleven stand for by buying a bottled water and nothing else. Doubt and mistrust blossom in Michael’s heart. 

“Hear you like video games?” she says once they pull into Michael’s driveway, to which Michael shrugs. One of the things the kids at school used to do when he was little was sit at his lunch table and try and get him to talk, ‘cause he talked a lot. They’d ask him about his interests, then pass around notes of all the weird shit he said when he forgot to watch himself. He’s so not there for that. 

“You wanna play?” Jenna asks. “I bet I can beat you at Wii tennis.” 

“So?” Michael demands. 

Jenna shrinks back. 

“I’m gonna make us nachos,” Michael announces. He smiles big, but he can’t shake the feeling that he’s facing an execution. He makes the hell out of those nachos, though. He’s a good host who feeds people, but Jenna only picks at them. Michael could kill Jeremy for forcing him into this and not even coming along. He’s so annoyed that he can barely hear what Jenna’s talking about, until she brings up Chloe with a shrill note of desperation in her voice. 

“You’ll never guess what Chloe told me about you,” is what she says, with a tense emphasis on the word ‘you’. She leans across the table towards Michael. 

“What’d she say?” Michael asks. 

“She told me you were all over her at lunch,” Jenna says. “Said you saw that tamagotchi keychain on her bag, the pink one?”

“The cat. It wasn’t a real tamagotchi.” 

“Right, and you like went wild or something? Followed her to history class to tell her the history of tamagotchis and implied hers wasn’t good enough or whatever, not that she cared about tamagotchis anyway. She said it was the weirdest conversation she ever had. It’s like you speak a language that only you and Jeremy can understand. She couldn’t even figure out if you were hitting on her or not. I told her you were too gay for that. You _are_ too gay for that, right?” 

“I was speaking English,” says Michael. “I understand others, but Jeremy doesn’t.” 

“She said you latched onto her and wouldn’t shut up. She didn’t know what to do with you.”

Michael rubs his hair, then stops. His mom says he looks like he’s trying to shake invisible sand off his scalp when he does this, and his other mom agrees. Jeremy once said that he got dandruff everywhere, then looked guilty and challenged him to an (admittedly super gross) ‘dandruff snowstorm’ competition. Jenna is staring, and for a moment Michael thinks she’s going to back away in disgust. Then, she leans in closer and takes his hand. Michael looks down at it, like some kind of weird moth has just landed on him. 

“Brooke says she likes you but can only take you in small doses,” Jenna says. That hurts more than the Chloe thing, ‘cause other than Jeremy and Christine, Brooke is the person in the Squip Squad who Michael comes the closest to getting on with (discounting the steaming heap of wtf that is his relationship with Rich Goranski). 

That evening, several hours after Michael drops Jenna off at home, he gets a text from her, apologizing. It says that she defaults to gossip when she’s nervous in social situations, that she’d take it all back if she could. It’s just that she’s used to people not wanting to listen to her when she speaks, unless she’s got something to offer, and she’s tried so hard to offer up other things, but gossip is all anybody ever wants. 

**what do you like to talk about,** Michael texts back. He could’ve said that in person, but something about texting makes him think better. He’s a favorite on his Warcraft server, practically the guild psychologist.

 **myself lol not really idk philosophy. I’m afraid I’m too boring and I’m inflicting myself on others when I try to talk. There has to be something wrong with me, that keeps people from caring.**

For several minutes, Michael stares at the phone, thinking. Then, he gets another text:

**nm just venting its dumb**

Against his better judgement, he types out: **Not dumb. I feel you. maybe we can try hanging out again some time**

 **sure**

In that way, Michael and Jenna become entry level friends. 

It doesn’t completely undo the damage of their first real interaction. 

——————

When Michael was eleven, his cat Marie escaped from the house and got lost. A week later, Mama had accidentally run over her in the driveway. The event is number three on Michael’s list of the top ten worst things that have ever happened to him. Marie hadn’t died right away. She’d had this look of uncomprehending pain in her eyes, and all Michael could think was that nothing could have prepared her for the moment the tires rolled over her. She’d thought she was going out to to enjoy the sunshine and catch birds. Maybe she’d traveled further afield, gotten into more trouble than she’d meant to, and been relieved to see her familiar home again. In her last moments, she’d stumbled a little. She’d tried to dart into the bushes to hide. She’d made an ineffective and helpless attempt to lick the blood off her fur. 

Jeremy’s panic attacks, after things with the Squip are over and done with, remind Michael of that. They’re not life threatening, thank god, but there’s this senseless fear that emanates off Jeremy whenever they happen, mixed with increasingly abortive attempts to do normal Jeremy things, until the fear wins out and there’s no fight or ability to understand left in him at all. 

Michael treats Jeremy the way he’d want to be treated if he were the one who’d been mindfucked. 

(Never mind that Michael was mindfucked in his own way by the ordeal, and nobody especially noticed or cared.)

Michael does research into what’s going on, insofar as he can. Robot demons that possess you aren’t a big topic in psychiatric literature. That leaves Michael working on trial and error. In a way it’s like figuring out a science problem. He observes what Jeremy responds to, and settles that the best thing he can do for his friend is stay calm, keep close, and simplify. 

It all adds up to a lot of time telling Jeremy that everything is okay, and wishing that Jeremy would tell him the same thing. It’s not that Michael wants to have a panic attack. He’s had his share of those, and he hates the way they make his thoughts and emotions splatter. It’s just that some reassurance would be good. Michael isn’t sure if he’s spiraling or not. He decides that he probably isn’t, but it would be nice to have another person who could confirm that. 

——————

So, maybe Michael is a lot (like _a lot_ a lot), but he doesn’t need all that much. Life is all about the simple pleasures. He likes slushees and video games, B movies and legit science fiction, 80’s and 90’s everything, all the music, sushi, predictable routines, online gaming, the color red, skating, driving, his family, Jeremy. He’d be happy enough with just those things, plus Christine probably, ‘cause it turns out she’s the best human and he adores her almost as much as Jeremy does. 

Ironically (in the fake Alanis Morissette sense of the word), the world likes to bombard the fuck out of Michael with all kinds of sucky stuff that’s not on his approved list of experiences, all the while withholding stuff that he really needs. His new cafeteria table is loud with everybody talking at once. Chloe wears weird perfume. There are all together too many lightbulbs, lockers, and dusty chalkboards at school. Jeremy’s ability to concentrate is dead and if took out his ability to play Nintendo with it. It wouldn’t usually be that bad, but Michael’s off his game, and has been for a long while. 

That’s why, when Michael’s moms tell him that his biological mother (who he’s never seen or heard a word from) is trying to get in contact with him, Michael feels like he has none of the inner whatever he needs to deal with this grand new fuckery.


	2. Chapter 2

As long as he can remember, Michael’s known he was adopted. The narrative his moms have been telling him, since the start, has been one in which he came into the household because he was dearly, fervently wanted. The evidence of that is everywhere, from the old baby rearing books collecting dust in forgotten corners of the bookshelf, to the modest college fund his moms have been slowly building up for him (sometimes dollars and cents at a time) since before he was born. 

One time, when Michael was in second grade, he stomped on his teacher’s foot for confiscating Jeremy’s toy shark. When his mothers had arrived at the school office after the incident, he’d confidently explained to them that Jeremy had _needed_ his toy. He’d known he had to be the one to “tell” the teacher, since his moms always told him they’d love him whatever he did. This gave him powers that other kids didn’t have. It was a story his moms still talked about, and when they did, it often started out as a joke, only to become achingly sincere; they’d wanted him to have some fight in him, because as an interracial lesbian couple they’d had to fight tooth and nail for their marriage and fight for their right to adopt, all the while fighting for others who didn’t have a battle left in them. They’d wanted him to be able to fight too, when necessary. On the other hand, they’d also wanted to make sure that causing physical harm to others wouldn’t be his first recourse, that he understood that he couldn’t just casually inflict injury on anybody who crossed him. There’d been discussions and philosophy to deal with at home that night. Meanwhile, Michael’d been _seven_ and good at using words to express enthusiasm, but not especially adept at explaining when he was upset or angry. It hasn’t been easy. 

Michael’s whole concept of his mothers is wrapped up in their kindness and idealism, and also in the little moments between them. They’d been the ones to tuck him in at night, and also the ones to graciously take a step back from tucking him in at night when he’d felt himself too old for it. They’d been the one to enact “Pokémon Wednesdays” when he was eight and obsessed, an event in which each of them would have to present one cool Pokémon fact, something which Michael’s moms had studiously researched even though they hadn’t been big into Pokémon themselves. They’d also been the one to change it gradually into “really cool thing” Wednesdays, an occasion which consisted of giving each of them a chance to choose the topic on alternating weeks, and doing research on whatever that topic might be (even if it wasn’t your thing, because part of forming relationships was learning to care about other people’s things). 

In retrospect, Michael is pretty sure that that’d been his parents way of trying to teach him how to interact with others. The only one he’s ever interacted with much was Jeremy, but yeah. He’d been embarrassingly bad at realizing Jeremy could have different interests and ideas than him when they’d been little. He’d answer for Jeremy when people asked what Jeremy liked to do or what his favorite color was, always just assuming that their answers would be the same. 

Michael is way better about that now. 

Even so, Michael can remember being ten and faced with Jeremy’s growing X-Men obsession, and generously suggesting that he should make a PowerPoint and tell him about it for thirty minutes. That hadn’t been normal. In no way, shape, or form had that been normal. 

Sometimes Michael wonders if his parents should have tried to stamp the weirdness out of him, or if they _did_ try but failed. 

There’s a lot that Michael still doesn’t get. 

———————

Michael’s first indication that he’s got a third mother on the horizon is a huge box that arrives in the mail. He’s intrigued, because it’s big as hell. His mama looks apprehensive dragging it in. 

“What’d you order?” Michael asks. He’s not expecting anything, though there’s something about boxes that always makes him feel like maybe he should be getting something. 

“It’s for you,” says mama. Mom is sitting at attention on the couch nearby, it’s neither Christmas nor Michael’s birthday. ‘Just because’ presents aren’t unheard of. 

Michael moves forward, but his mom intercepts him with a hand on his shoulder. 

“Your biological mother turned thirty-two this week,” she says. 

“....” Michael answers. His bio mom isn’t a big topic of conversation. His moms have always said that she was nice, but very young. They’ve said that she wanted to contact him someday, but not yet. 

Mom puts a hand on Michael’s cheek, but Michael squirms away. It’s a habit, and a weird one, because he loves his parents. “She’s the same age we were when we brought you home,” Mom explains. 

“...” Michael answers. He shakes his head to clear it, then gives his moms a thumbs up. “That’s awesome,” he says. “Good for her.” Mentally, he’s doing math. If his bio-mom is just turning thirty two now, and he’s currently 16, that’d mean she would’ve been... _also_ sixteen when she had him. 

“She wanted to wait,” says Mama. “She’s bought you a birthday gift every year since you were born, but she didn’t want to... open the door, as it were, until she was ready. Are you ready?” 

“For what?” Michael asks. “It’s a shit ton of belated birthday gifts, right? I was born ready. Literally. Birthdays are like that.” 

“Well then,” says Mom. She gestures to the box. “You wanna open it in private or with us here? Or later? You can open it later. We’ll do this at your pace.” 

“There’s no way I’m waiting till later.” Michael rubs his hands together. He’s not excited per say, but he’s totally not up for waiting. If he waits even five minutes. It’ll be five minutes of mentally unwrapping that package in his mind and wondering what’s inside. He gives it an experimental poke. Nothing jumps out at him. It’s a heavy box. He looks behind him for his Mama. She’s not there, but then she is, and she’s got a box cutter. 

~*INSERT SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC*~

(or at least insert some sick beatz)

Michael opens the box. There’s a note at the top. It’s polite to read notes before looking at presents. He pockets it instead, half expecting his parents to remind him not to do that. They don’t. 

There are individually wrapped gifts inside, with numbers written on each one— thirteen, four, seven, one, zero. 

“Should I do this in order, or—?”

“What do you think?” 

“In order. Backwards order. God, I don’t know. Maybe forwards order? Cool numbers first? Nine is a pretty cool number.” Michael glances up at his parents. His mom nods. 

Number nine is wrapped in paper with fish printed on it. The creases are faded white. Could it have really been wrapped and put aside seven years ago? Michael tears the paper off, finding it too brittle to be new. Inside is a book about baseball. Anti-climatic and boring!

Michael examines the baseball book in his hand. “She’s never met me,” he says, maybe needlessly. He puts the book aside and grabs another present. This one is in a silvery box, also old and worn. The number written on it is ‘three’. There’s a t-shirt with a teddy bear on it. Michael holds it in front of his body. It’s definitely meant for a toddler, not Michael as he is now. 

Sixteen is a basketball. Fourteen is an expired iTunes gift card. Six is a stuffed dog with sunglasses, which Michael can totally get behind. Zero is a soft blanket that smells of dust. The rest of it is pretty lack luster, like his bio mom just went to the boys’ section of the toy aisle, and got him whatever toy trucks and sports balls she figured a boy might like. 

“So,” says Michael, when it’s all over. 

“Any thoughts?” asks mom. 

Michael shakes his head. In all actuality, his mind is blank. 

It’s only much later that Michael starts to have ideas about the whole thing.   
He calls Jeremy. That’s typically what he does when he has thoughts. 

“So my biological mom sent me a lot of weird stuff,” Michael says. 

“Seriously?” 

“Yeah! There were all these—”

“But seriously. Michael. You’ve got three moms now. That’s way too many moms.”

“I guess, but—” Michael pauses. He’s got three moms, and Jeremy doesn’t have any. That means he can’t get too heavy with all this, even if he wants to. He can say something, but it needs to be funny. Otherwise he should keep his mouth shut. That’s called being considerate.

“What’d she send?” Jeremy asks. 

“Baby clothing. Dollar store toys. Balls.” 

“Cool. All your favorite things. That’s gotta be weird.” 

Michael shrugs. “Not the weirdest thing I’ve ever experienced, man. What’s up with you?”

**Author's Note:**

> Please review.


End file.
